Leftist Campaign Against Purim Hits the Web

A leftist campaign making the rounds in Israeli cyberspace is telling Israelis to think twice before celebrating Purim because Megillat Esther promotes genocide by Jews against its enemies.

The internet pamphlet plays on a popular Purim greeting, ‘Sameach u’mevadech’ (happy and humorous), and asks rhetorically if people really know what Purim is about. It proceeds to list verses from Megillat Esther that seemingly implicate the Jewish people in genocide. It ends by asking readers if they too think that genocide is “happy and humorous.”

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To dispel any idea that it was a hoax, prominent Israeli blogger Yossi Gurevich posted it on a Facebook page titled ‘החברים של ג’ורג’ with text in Hebrew saying “let’s leave Purim to Bashar Assad and celebrate festivals that are a bit more human.”

Anti-Purim Internet Pamphlet

Beyond taking self-loathing to a height that only radical left-wing Jews can reach, it’s clear that the campaign organizers are neither masters nor students of Torah exegesis.

How come the Left always manages to take the fun out of everything, anyway?

I didn’t know someone could internalize their enemies’ message to the point of reneging on the signification of their own tradition. Purim isn’t about celebrating a genocide any more than Pessah is. It’s about the right to live, to exist as a Jew, as a free human being, as a member of Israel. It’s about recognizing that, yes, someone had to die for us to be alive and free. We don’t celebrate so much that death as the fact that is suppressed a source of death for ourselves. Furthermore, how is the death of Haman, an antisemitic crook, and his sons a genocide? The Persian, as a people and as an empire weren’t harmed at all in the story.